Your web presence is of vital importance to your business. It is a well-established fact that content is at the heart of your web presence. You need to write content and you need to share content with others easily.

You will only be successful when it comes to your web presence if you are able to successfully and easily share content with other people, who will, in turn, share it with other people, etc. If other people feel that your content is worth sharing but it turns out to be too difficult to send to others, they won’t bother a second time. The world today is extremely fast paced. Everyone wants instant gratification of all types.

If you expect people to talk about what you are offering, you need to make it really easy to do so. If it takes more than one (or two, at the most) steps to accomplish this, forget it. If, on the other hand, you have a social media button in plain view, people will be willing to click on it. If your web presence is built around blog software (such as WordPress, for example), there are some plugins that you will want to install. They are Facebook Share and TweetMeme Retweet Button. It will take you very little time to install and set them up.

Once the plugins are installed, you will be able to show the buttons on your posts and pages (wherever on the page you would like them to appear). They will also indicate how many times other people have shared your content with others as well as some other options. If you don’t use WordPress, it will be a little more challenging for you. You will have to install the codes for each of the social media channels on your website. If you don’t feel comfortable doing it yourself, you may have to consider hiring someone else to do it. You can get instructions from Facebook and Twitter. They are relatively simple to install.

Call-to-action

Remember that it is important to tell your readers what you want them to do. If you don’t tell them, they won’t understand and there will be no chance at interactions. You shouldn’t think that they won’t be willing to do what you ask of them. Most likely, they will be willing. If you want them to share your content, be as specific as possible. Choose to identify whichever social media channels you feel will be most effective and don’t be afraid to name them specifically.

Understanding your target audience

It goes without saying that you need to understand your target audience before you can do anything else. With that knowledge in hand, you can then build your web presence. Never forget the concept of WIIFM (What’s In It For Me). Part of truly understanding your target audience means that you are able to identify their problems and solve them. You need to have your audience in mind when you start to build your web presence. As you are building the content, if you have an understanding of the audience, you will know what to offer them. You will also be more knowledgeable about offering products and/or services that are of great interest to them and that they will be inclined to buy.

Always be as accessible as possible

Being accessible online means a lot of things. First of all, you need to have a simple and straightforward navigation system that doesn’t present any obstacles to the user. The last thing that you need is to put obstacles in the way of your visitors doing what you want them to do for you. You also want people to be able to find you online very easily. People want to engage with you. You just need to make it as easy as possible for them.

Conclusion

With such a wealth of competition and with so many people trying to make their mark in the online world, it is more important than ever for you to have as much of an edge as you can. So many aspects of social media are important in business today. Having your web presence be social media friendly will absolutely make people want to connect with you in a huge way. Ensuring that your web presence is such a simple thing to do and at the same time, it is pure genius!

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let's have coffee.

Michael Cohn is the founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of CompuKol Communications LLC. He has over 25 years of experience in IT and web technologies.

Mr. Cohn founded CompuKol Communications to help small businesses and entrepreneurs increase their exposure and reputation on the Internet. CompuKol consults, creates, and implements communication strategies for small businesses to monopolize their markets with a unique business voice, vision, and visibility.

Prior to that, Mr. Cohn spent a significant amount of time at a major telecommunications company, where his main focus was on initiating and leading synergy efforts across all business units by dramatically improving efficiency, online collaboration, and the company’s Intranet capabilities, which accelerated gains in business productivity. His expertise includes social media marketing strategies; internet marketing; web presence design; business analysis; project management; management of global cross-matrix teams; systems engineering and analysis, architecture, prototyping and integration; technology evaluation and assessment; systems development; performance evaluation; and management of off-shore development.

Mr. Cohn earned a Master’s degree in project management from George Washington University in Washington, DC; and a Master’s degree in computer science and a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, NJ.

5 Responses to "Making Sure That Your Web Presence is Social Media Friendly"

This is a very informative article. I liked the idea of the call to action being to remind them to use the Facebook and Twitter buttons. Sometimes it's the simple ideas that I miss as I look at the complex problems.

Carolyn, I agree. We started a blog for our business on a site that made it difficult for readers to share the content. We've dropped that blog and are working with our web developers to add a blog page to our site with the appropriate buttons to share it.Posted by Mary Lou

Great article; thanks for sharing. Websites also need to be structured such that content items look attractive when shared on sites like Facebook. I'm currently managing the web and social media strategy for a small political action committee, and I'm finding that because our content items from our website don't each reside on their own unique webpage, the item headlines don't pull in when they're "shared" on Facebook. The header is just the general website's header for each one, and it's tough to tell what is actually being shared. So, in order to build a truly effective strategy for online engagement with your constituents, it's important to consider how a website and social media work together.Posted by Eleanore

Via LinkedIn Groups • Group: Medical/Healthcare Communications, Medical Education, Pharma Advertising & Marketing Professionals • Discussion: Making Sure That Your Web Presence is Social Media FriendlyThanks for that reminder Carolyn, and let's remind folks also that all content, whether on social media sites, micro sites or even printed material needs to be monitored and needs to say the same thing verbatim. It's so interesting to me how huge social media is and how few businesses are using it to their advantage to create and monitor content that puts them in a good light in consumers' eyes and how businesses are not integrating marketing, social media and all mediums together. Posted by Terry